How pocket doors can help improve the flow of your home

The pocket door has become an innovative home design solution that is ideal for contemporary homes and modern living. Increasingly we are looking for smart home solutions; installations and systems that make our lives easier, more convenient and which carry out multiple functions. We might see this in smart ‘home’ systems, for example, which, through one device, play music, control our heating and provide home security by controlling alarms and showing us who is at the front door. It might not seem an obvious comparison, but the pocket door is a similar type of smart solution because it provides multiple purposes, all designed to make our lives easier.

Installing a pocket door plays a central role in designing a new-build property, but also in home renovations, because it can:

• Provide flexible spaces
• Create new rooms
• Create a new use for a room
• Enable a room to become multi-purpose   

The pocket door opens horizontally into a wall pocket and hence does not encroach into a room by opening in an arc like a traditional hinged door. This opens up various possibilities in how a home can be designed and adapted to bring multiple benefits.

The benefits of a pocket door in home design

If you include a pocket door in your design scheme for a new home, or for a home renovation, you can expect the following benefits:

• More space – Pocket doors can create around ten square feet of extra space, which can be vital in terms of what you can fit in, how you design it, or what you can use a room for.
• Accessibility – The door opening into a wall pocket provides a wider entrance, meaning people with mobility issues can move between rooms easier.
• Insulation – Pocket doors create better thermal and noise insulation because they can provide a better seal with a reduced gap around the edges of the door.
• Obstruction – Because the pocket door disappears from view it is not an obstacle to light or free movement when left open.
• Aesthetics – Pocket doors create a seamless visual appeal which is sleek and elegant and ideal for a modern minimalist home with clean lines and a clutter-free appearance.
• Flexibility – In addition to dividing larger rooms into two smaller rooms and enabling a room to be multi-purpose, pocket doors can provide a temporary wall to make a space adaptable and flexible. This allows you to use space differently according to your needs, lifestyle and the time of day.

It is this final benefit which perhaps provides the most under-appreciated benefit of the pocket door, but which is ideal for modern living. Increasingly we demand customisation and personalisation and for design solutions to be bespoke and adaptable to exactly meet our needs. This fits in with our desires for flexible living and for cutting out waste and making the best possible use of every inch of space in our home, and also for helping improve the flow of our home.    

Improve the flow in your home with pocket doors

Imagine this scenario; you are hosting a family Christmas party and have 16 people round, but the living room can only fit half that amount of people. The rest of the guests have to sit in the dining room or the kitchen. It means people become isolated, conversation doesn’t flow and the atmosphere of the party never quite gets going. Ideally, you want people to come and go freely, to mingle and socialise in a seamless space with easy transition and no barriers. In another scenario, at meal times when all the family are home and you are using the dining room, do you have to carry hot dishes, drinks and plates from the kitchen, risking spillages and accidents? What about in an evening when you want to watch a film, or have some quiet time working, reading or studying, is it hard to find a small, quiet space away from the hustle of the rest of the home?

The pocket door can solve all these issues and create a more natural flow to a downstairs space that works to suit your needs. By using double pocket doors you can link a kitchen directly to a living room or dining room, and you can open and close these doors as you need to create a flexible space. This means your home can be open, communal and full of life when you want it to be but can also be quiet, intimate and cosy at other times. Adapting the same space with temporary partitions offers great flexibility and practicality.

Having this flexibility helps a home work, and means you can host larger communal occasions that have flow, life and atmosphere, but can close these spaces off to also create smaller, quiet spaces as needed.